Why can't S & S do a deal with the German publishers to share costs of their covers rather than pay for their own Photoshop cut and paste jobs.

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S&S feels that their current cover approach is what's most likely to sell books. (If they didn't, they'd do something else instead!)

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I don't know about that. I'd assume that outside of the boost the movie release will give, demand for Trek novels is relatively inelastic. Therefore a cheapish cover image will not harm sales much, in the same way as a superb (and more expensive) painted cover probably would only boost sales slightly.

Pooling resources for a shared cover would therefore make good financial sense...

I doubt it's as simple as two companies failing to pool resources. Cross Cult do use Pocket Books covers for many of their books. The reasons they might make their own at other times could be many, and certainly not limited to them simply not liking some of the less impressive Pocket covers - They are catering to a different market with different tastes. They are often publishing their versions of books years after the originals, so might want to model a new cover on what they think will work in the current market, not designs of years ago. Plus I imagine there's at least a little bit of it being about getting publicity; they get to make a bit of a fuss when they reveal a new cover design, so more people will hear about their books as a result.

So any money saved by not making two cover designs is I'm sure carefully balanced against the benefits of paying out to make something new. Plus it's not like Pocket can't make good covers on their own; I'd say Pocket and Cross Cult have similar hit and miss rates.

If I am translating the German correctly, it is going to be an e-book only release, which, from that first reaction, seems to be a shock to German fans. One fan has even asked if Cross Cult could just skip the ebook and do something similar to what they did with an earlier DS9 book (Demons of Air And Darkness-Horn and Ivory printed as one book in the past? The post, by Fabian Timme, says "DS9 band 804", which I'm not too sure what that means!)